A Vision for NC’s Patient Portal

Background

Navigating Care’s mission is to improve cancer patients’ lives by intelligently connecting oncology practices with their patients. While their clinic-facing tools were robust, the patient portal had been neglected since it was initially built 13 years prior, and patient engagement was low. Executives had identified some of the major problems: it didn’t resize on mobile, had no integration with newer patient-facing services, and its functionality was extremely outdated.

I was brought into the company tasked with the goals of designing a new patient portal and helping the product team strategize how to integrate the new portal with existing patient-facing service. The first step was to develop a vision to align executive and client stakeholders on what a better patient experience could be.

My Role

I was hired before any product managers, and was responsible for all research & discovery, UX copy, prototyping, visual design, and design execution.

Skills used:
+ User research
+ Content strategy
+ Information architecture
+ Visual Design
+ Prototyping
+ Stakeholder alignment through story-telling & presentations

Research & Discovery

First, I analyzed 250 patient responses to our NPS survey to get the patient perspective on the pain points with the current portal. I also interviewed people with cancer to develop a more complete perspective on the patient journey, which helped put the portal in context and uncover additional opportunities for Navigating Care to have impact.

Next I interviewed stakeholders from across the organization including sales and customer support to help me get a broad-strokes understanding of the problem space. From a business perspective, gaps in the patient experience were affecting revenue opportunities.

The largest buckets of UX pain points were:

• Navigation: Patients couldn’t find new health records. New health records showed up at the very bottom of a long page, and there was no indication of which content was new.

• Mobile usability: The old portal wasn’t responsive, and zooming in truncated content.

• Log-in issues

Once I had all of the pain points analyzed, I sat down with the director of product and we prioritized them based on a combination of level of effort and impact to our users.

User Persona & Journey Mapping

There was already a researched persona in place that our teams were using as a demo patient, so I flushed her out with high level pain points taken from the patient journey map. Then I looked at how we might be able to alleviate those pain points within the framework of a patient portal.

I added pain points from my research to a cancer patient journey map from the National Library of Cancer and identified touch points between the patient journey and our patient portal.

Mapping the Patient Ecosystem

Another factor in designing a new patient portal was that there were two newer mobile features that were completely separate from the old portal. Health Tracker was a mobile service that checked in with patients about their symptoms, and Home Care Instructions allowed clinicians to send care-instructions to patients over text.

As part of building a cohesive patient experience, I needed to consider when and how to integrate these other patient-facing services with the new portal. I mapped the ecosystem of the various services, which showed how disconnected they were and helped me identify where connections need to be made.

From this research, I created some basic principles for a new global navigation that would allow us to build a cohesive, integrated patient experience. I broke them out into two buckets: one around usability, and one to ensure we were considering how to scale for the future.

Usability

• Nav must allow patient to navigate from Point A to Point B and back

• Consistent placement of navigation 

• Mobile-friendly

• User-aware: patient vs clinic vs supporter

• Relevant: Users can easily find the content that is most important to them

Finally, I built wireframes for what a global navigation following these principles could look like, and used them to kick-off design conversations with the engineering team. They also formed the basis for the navigation in the conceptual designs.

Imperatives

All of this research gave me a data-based perspective on the features and functionality that needed to be included in the new patient experience, and led me to develop 4 imperatives. Those were:

1. Meet the patient where they are.

The majority of our users are over 55, and 60% of our patient visits were from a smartphone or tablet, so the new experience must optimized for older, mobile users. 

2. Anticipate patient needs

I researched what  information and actions patients most need from their patient portal, and designed an intuitive navigation that puts that information front and center. 

3. Easy-to-read view of complex data

The primary reason our patients come to their patient portal is to check their latest lab results, so their health records must be easy to view and understand even on smaller smartphone screens

4. Easy access to critical information

Finally, we needed to make access to critical information as easy as possible. That meant improving the sign-in experience, as well as creating clear, direct notifications to new messages and health records.

Define

Now that I’d clarified the problem space, I could define a “How might we ….” question and begin diving into solution explorations. “How might we” questions are a way to frame your goal, and are often used for launching brainstorm or ideation phases. They need to be broad enough that there are a wide range of solutions while still keeping a team focused on the overarching objective.

How might we build a new patient experience that allows our patients to easily find important information, on the device they choose?

The objective was broad, but based on a foundation of data and insights that would inform how we build our product strategy and prioritize our resources in a way that had the most immediate, positive impact on our users. Once we had our imperatives and “How might we…” question, it was time to get more granular about the work that needed to be done.

User Scenarios & Mobile Prototype

I created three user scenarios to illustrate how this new, mobile-friendly experience would address the imperatives I’d identified earlier, and used those to develop a prototype that would serve as a guiding vision for the new patient experience.

Scenario 1: Cohesion

The first scenario illustrates how the various patient experiences can fit together to create a more unified experience.

Scenario 2: New Lab Results

One of the major complaints from patients is that they’re not able to understand what’s new in their health records, so the next scenario shows a new vision for a patient trying to find a new lab result. 

Scenario 3: Patient education

In the final scenario, patient education is combined with our cancer resources library so a patient can find all of the information relevant to their diagnosis in one place, and NC can better track engagement with educational materials.

Outcome

When I presented this work to the executives and product teams it generated company-wide excitement and support, and I got the green light to move to the next step, which was to develop a visual look and feel.